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Angry? Think Again: Self-Awareness Changes the Body’s Anger Response

Written by Rachel Barclay
| Published on June 5, 2013

Reflecting on feelings of anger can cause physical changes in how the body processes the emotion, according to a new study by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of California, San Francisco.

One basic law of science is that the act of measuring a thing can
alter it—a camera’s lens will distort the light that passes through it, a
thermometer built to measure absolute zero will generate traces of
heat, and a teenager is more likely to lie when his parents are
watching. And it turns out that reflecting on feelings of anger actually
changes the body's physical response to the emotion.

Many
studies involve asking subjects to self-report their emotions. Dr. Karim
Kassam and Dr. Wendy Mendes, in a study published today in PLOS ONE, wanted to understand more about how the act of self-reporting can affect a subject’s emotional and physical state.

“Wendy
and I do a lot of emotion research,” said Kassam, an assistant
professor of social and decision sciences at Carnegie Mellon University.
“How can you know what someone is feeling unless you ask people? But
does asking people how they’re feeling change how they’re feeling?”

Measuring Anger and Shame

In
their study, Kassam and Mendes had their subjects perform a difficult
mathematics task. Some of the subjects received negative feedback on
their performance from an experimenter, while others did not.

Of
those who received the negative feedback, some got feedback designed to
cause feelings of anger—the experimenter behaved rudely and
incompetently, for example—while others received feedback that suggested
the subject’s poor performance was his or her own fault, which was
meant to cause feelings of shame.

After the test and feedback,
some of the subjects were asked to report how they felt, while others
were not. Through the whole experiment, Kassam and Mendes measured the
subjects’ vital signs to see whether their bodies' fight-or-flight
response system was activated.

Their results were striking.
Unsurprisingly, feelings of shame and anger provoked a greater physical
response than neutral feelings, though the response to anger was more
extreme. The difference between anger and shame was apparent after the
subjects offered a self-report. While reflecting on shame had no
particular effect, reflecting on anger completely changed the subjects'
physiological responses.

On its own, anger causes a challenge
response—an activation of the fight-or-flight system. Heart rate
increases and blood flows from the brain and central organs out to major
muscle groups, preparing you to face off against a saber-toothed tiger.
But when subjects reflected on their anger, they instead showed a
threat response—imagine a deer freezing in the headlights of an oncoming
car—also known as a fright response, with lower heart rate and blood
concentrating in the core of the body.

The Pathway to Stress

So why is anger so different from shame?

“Shame
is a self-conscious emotion that people are aware of, whereas with
anger, people may not be thinking about that,” Kassam told Healthline.
“People can go through aspects of their lives and not really think about
how they’re stressed or angry. It’s in the back of their mind. Asking
them to think about it helps bring it to the forefront.”

Although
talking about feelings of anger does lower heart rate and blood
pressure, Kassam warns that this is not always a solution. The challenge
response could then be replaced with a threat response, which may not
be a wise trade-off.

“What we see in terms of a cardiovascular
response is that it’s worse when it’s brought to the forefront,” Kassam
explained. Repeat activation of your body's threat response can end up
causing chronic stress and depression. “If you’re ruminating on your
anger in a situation where you cannot extract yourself from it,
awareness may not be a good thing.”

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